Digitisation of cultural heritage of minority communities for equity and renewed engagement

Cultural heritage (CH) digitisation brought great opportunities to preserve, maintain and promote it. Yet, it also triggers challenges in terms of representation and content exhibition. This becomes particularly pressing in the context of CH of minorities. Overall, this reduces participation and inclusion of minorities, hindering equitable representations of diverse values in digitisation, leading to increased risks of misuse of digital CH. DIGICHer tackles these challenges by providing new understanding on key legal and policy, socio-economic and technological factors governing digitisation of minorities’ CH. Following the citizen science and co-creation approach DIGICHer develops a novel scalable framework and methods to promote equitable, diverse and inclusive practices, verified via user-centric approaches through pilots with three minority groups in the EU: the Sámi, the Jewish and the Ladin people with a further exploitation in other minorities groups. On these bases, it develops recommendations for policy and decision makers, as well as CH institutions, and delivers methods for decision support to monitor the field of digital heritage with specific regards to its diversity long-term.The DIGICHer interdisciplinary consortium will lead to several actions and outcomes that will increase minorities’ involvement in the digitisation and usage of their CH, contributing to a more responsive and democratic cultural sector, whose digital activities reflect the plurality of minorities’ worldviews in Europe. Minority heritage will be represented in a way which respects minorities’ values, ensuring better understanding and enhanced engagement with minority heritage collections by the general public and professional heritage users, leading to more resilient European cultural institutions with a pluralistic offer that is appealing to a diverse future generation of audiences.